#MarketingExcellenceAwards highlight: How ST Engineering consolidated over 20 brands and unified its identity

ST Engineering has come a long way with a history of delivering innovative engineering solutions. The company focuses on bringing innovation and technology together to create real-world solutions for customers and has deployed  more than 700 smart city projects across 130 cities.

Over the years of innovation, a diverse suite of products and solutions were curated under its Electronics sector, but it created disparate product brands identity. Aware of the need to converge and strengthen its brand equity, the company set out to transform all the different brands into a unique service culture approach to unifying its branding.

The revamping efforts thoroughly impressed the judges at MARKETING-INTERACTIVE's Marketing Excellence Awards 2020, and saw ST Engineering walking away with a gold award for the category Excellence in Marketing Transformation. On top of that, the company was also shortlisted as a finalist for the category of Excellence in Experiential Marketing for its showcase gallery, Innosuite. 

Challenge

Over the past 50 years, the electronics sector of ST Engineering had developed over 20 brands for its suite of products and solutions. Each had a unique name but no clear persona. Each had its logo design, but were disparate without an anchor or overarching look. Apart from the market confusion, there is also a lack of brand awareness and affinity.

There was also a lack of product brand governance and architecture to build brand equity. There was no structure provided to the product owners on the branding harmonisation. The businesses were also not leveraging on the parent brand.

The marketing team at Electronics set out to complete three objectives to provide clarity on its branding architecture and marketing know-how to best position its offerings:

1. Alignment – to better harmonise and manage its product branding;
2. Systemise – to develop a more systematic approach to btanding its products and solutions;
3. Transform – to develop the way the organisation go-to-market with clear products brand architecture.

Strategy

ST Engineering came up with an inclusive yet pragmatic approach to effect adoption and transformative go-to market.

The START Approach was adopted as it turns the approach into actions with a lens to: Sense through in-depth conversations with senior management and market combing; think with a dynamic hypothesis and engage the broader stakeholders to co-curate; act to close the loop and refine the proposed options to senior leadership team; resolve to systemise the brand architecture; and tell to activate and shoutout.

After a discussion with the senior management, ST Engineering decided on three things:

1. All products and solutions will adopt a descriptive approach
2. It will decide on an Ingredient Brand to manifest its distinctive service culture. The brand will also be applied directly on consumer facing and channel sales products, where corporate brand may not applicable
3. Three key unanimous service values: conscious innovations with an inventive mindset, intuitive experiences, and incisive decisions.

Various brands were put forth and the final unanimous decision landed on AGIL. It would operate based on the three services values that the company decided.

Execution

The roll-out is split into internal and external. Externally, ST Engineering refreshed its suite of collateral and adopted new ingredient brand logos and guidelines. It also increased AGIL’s digital presence through LinkedIn banner, webinar invite banner, email-sign-off, mobile app, and Zoom backdrop. Additionally, ST Engineering created marketing collaterals and corporate gifts, and launched thematic campaigns to raise the awareness of its new ingredient brand, to name a few: “#Ideasforchange”, “Resilience/Thrive in the Dynamic” campaign, and “Sensemaking: Humanify Tech to Thrive”. Internally, ST Engineering did a “Who is AGIL?” staff shoutout, and launched an AGIL intranet site. It also created marketing toolkits in the form of playbook and visual IDs.

ST Engineering also refreshed its electronicsreview.com website to AGILblog.com. The new website is designed to reflect the 3Is of AGIL with a newly minted look, spotlighting on Tech Views, Tech in Actions, Happenings and Key Campaigns upfront.

Results

Branding is a journey, but within a span of a year, AGIL has become ST Engineering’s way of solutioning, its service culture and its attitude. Additionally, AGILblog.com and its logo made it to the top list on Google search. AGILblog.com also hovered around in top five to nine pages for smart cities blog search organically.

For its campaigns, ST Engineering also hit an average of 15,000 unique page views within the first week. Its series of AGIL webinars had also reached out to over 3,000 customers.